This invention relates to a system and method of providing software support within an operating environment for connectable peripherals which are connectable to a computer system. More specifically, the invention relates to providing such support for peripheral devices such as pointing devices, typically a mouse.
In the past, in order to connect peripheral devices, such as pointing devices or a mouse, to a computer running an operating system, for example, such as PC DOS or IBM OS/2.RTM. which are well known. operating systems which are commercially available from IBM Corporation, each independent device had to have a device driver program module which was loaded into the computer enabling the device to work within the operating system. Typically, in order to prepare such modules the interfaces and other internal aspects of the operating system are needed to be documented and made known to the manufacturers of those devices to permit them to prepare the complicated device driver modules.
In the case of OS/2, for example, for each release specific mouse support interfaces have been defined and incorporated into the operating system. A problem with this is that the interfaces change from release to release, and therefore, original equipment manufacturers are faced with the task of having to provide completely new device drivers for their devices in order to permit them to operate with the newly released version of the operating system.
This problem is further complicated because in more recent developments, especially with operating systems such as OS/2, there are internal device interfaces which are undocumented, making it impossible for a peripheral device manufacturer to prepare a peripheral device support program module, i.e., driver or device driver.
In accordance with the invention, there is provided a solution to this problem by a specific modification of the operating system.